Chapter 10 #3
She forced a smile on her face. “Good to know, sir. Thank you.”
Jonah frowned. “Are you feeling well, Alice? I know you had some . . . health issues before you went to Florida.”
She kept the smile even and free of tension. “That wasn’t nearly as much of an issue as my contact thought it was. And the other thing was . . . just a little too much fun, sir, nothing more serious.”
“Work hard, play hard, I suppose.” He smiled. “Dixons tend to do both to somewhat unhealthy extremes, but you’ve always managed to tread the middle path. Let me know if you need more support for the dust-up with Allens and Menendez. I will need that report by Tuesday.”
“Yes, sir.” Alice’s voice remained level.
She went to her office, a short hallway from a man who had methodically tortured a child, and shook for a minute. Then she made her hands still, her breathing steady, and her mind stop spinning. She had work to do.
In the months that followed, Alice did her job of maintaining good public relations for the ASC while secretly digging to the rotten heart of the organization.
Because controlling public relations meant knowing the intimate details of the shit in danger of hitting the fan, she had more access to files than most in her department.
She found financial records, torture tapes, monster death rates inside Freak Camp, and learned, reading between the lines, of several horrifying cases of non-freak civilians who ended up within the walls of FREACS and never left them again.
Worst were the clinical reports of experiments done on the monsters within the camp.
Those made the bile rise in her throat and gave her nightmares to match the ones caused by the original video.
She found Jonah’s stash of personal blackmail tapes and learned why the senior senator from Montana was so reliable in his support of ASC initiatives.
Somewhere in her hunt for information, she realized that the gaunt boy seen over and over in the 1999 videos was Jake Hawthorne’s monster.
Alice made obsessive copies of documents, video recordings, names, dates, and financials. It was damning enough, if she could ever get it in front of the right eyes (and maybe during the next election year). She worked tirelessly on building the trap that would burn everything to the ground.
Then the Cleveland massacre story broke.
* * *
Five months later
On C-SPAN, Congress was filibustering a bill to close Freak Camp, and Tobias could not look away.
He stood with his arms folded in their motel room lined with ratty, flower-patterned wallpaper, watching each man and woman stand up in the congressional chamber to declare their stance, some passionately and some in a dry, rehearsed cadence in line with every speech they’d ever made.
Jake, Tobias knew, couldn’t stand “those slick-suited motherfuckers,” but Tobias needed to see this.
It was the culmination of months of protest, of formal denunciations, of pledges of accountability, even justice.
Tobias’s breath caught at times as he saw the momentous stakes before them, the potential for change in the laws he had always known to govern the universe.
But naturally, nothing about the process was quick. Tobias was good at being patient. Jake, on the other hand. . .
“Hey, tiger, let’s go for a run.”
Tobias glanced at Jake. “You go.”
Jake blew out his breath. “You know, you’re gonna turn into a motel lamp if you stand there long enough. How many hours have they been at this?”
Tobias checked the time, added the hours in his head. “Nearly twelve.”
“How much longer do you think they’ll keep going?”
Tobias shrugged. “Maybe twelve more? They’re tag-teaming.
” From all he’d read, the bill was unlikely to pass.
This filibuster was led by the national security hawks deep in the ASC’s pocket, who didn’t want the bill to even reach the floor for a vote.
He still needed to hear every argument, both those for and against shutting down Freak Camp.
He needed to see what points had an impact, which ones could sway the vote.
“So, you can catch up later on whatever you miss in the next hour. Come on, Tobias. Catch some rays with me.”
Not so long ago, Tobias would have struggled to say no to Jake, even when he suspected Jake was only asking for something he knew Tobias could and would refuse.
Now, Tobias told Jake no all the time, over matters small and large, and he hardly ever thought about it.
He rarely felt that clenching tension in his gut before saying no either.
As he decided to relent this time, it was with the knowledge that he was saying yes willingly and wholeheartedly, and it was no more correct than any other answer.
“Okay,” Tobias said, with a last glance at the current speaker as he reached for the remote. “We can take a quick run.”
* * *
As the Cleveland Massacre scandal intensified from a storm to a hurricane, Alice couldn’t tell what it would demolish and what it would leave untouched.
Despite the growing public outcry and demands for accountability, she knew that taking down the ASC, or at least its most corrupt elements, would require more than this furor and more than just herself.
As she wrestled with the dilemma of whom she could trust, Alice realized she knew someone who was certain to hate Freak Camp with all his heart.
If Jake Hawthorne’s under-the-radar lifestyle wasn’t enough evidence, the fact that 89UI6703 .
. . Tobias . . . had featured heavily in the “training videos” was bound to be a pretty good indication.
Even though Alice had long ago stopped updating Jonah on the whereabouts of his cousin Jake, she still kept up what she called her “Hawthorne Watch.” Most of the time it gave her notices about where Jake and Tobias had been, cases they had closed, and what monsters or supernatural threats they had eliminated.
Sometimes she delegated that investigative work to one of her underlings, mostly as a training exercise.
Piecing together a coherent story from fragments of news and supposition was good practice for them.
The idea that Jake Hawthorne was probably on her side hit Alice when she was in Butte, Montana, handling an issue with a local ASC office that had escalated enough to require her presence. After the situation was resolved, or as resolved as it was going to get, she checked on her Hawthorne Watch.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she muttered.
“What, ma’am?” Her young, wide-eyed intern looked up.
“Nothing,” Alice said. “Don’t worry about it.” She shut down her laptop and tucked it into its carrying case. “Just realized I have another errand to run before we head out. Should still be able to make the flight home tomorrow morning.”
If her Hawthorne alerts were accurate, Tobias and Jake had just finished a job in Deer Lodge, Montana, involving some kind of haunted object at the Old Montana Prison Museum. That was less than forty minutes away.
Deer Lodge was not that big. The alert had given her a bead on the Hawthorne’s motel, but when she didn’t spot Jake’s car in the lot, she drove around town in her anonymous gray rental. Less than five minutes later, she spotted her quarry: the notorious Eldorado, parked at a diner.
The Four B’s Restaurant was clunky but classic, with green signs and a retro diner interior. Alice parked on the other side of the lot from the Eldorado. Walking toward the restaurant, she wished she’d worn a hat, something with a brim to shade her face.
The place was almost empty. Alice ducked into one of the tall booths on the empty side of the restaurant and took a couple of careful breaths.
This was a stupid plan. She was going to get herself shot. Her face was extremely recognizable—she was literally the face of the ASC—and for the last six months she had succeeded in keeping anyone, especially a certain Director, from noticing her crisis of loyalty.
But what other options did she have? Try to convince the family that Jonah was a madman?
Turn hunters to her side? Go public with the very private, damning information that she had collected and wait like a sitting duck for Jonah’s surefire revenge?
Messed up as it was, the renegade Hawthornes were her best hope of allies, and Alice was probably the best chance they were ever going to get to take down FREACS and the ASC from the inside. She just had to tell them that.
Alice flipped open her phone and dialed a number that she had saved for exactly this occasion.
Jake Hawthorne didn’t keep the same number for long and he couldn’t be tracked reliably, but if you knew the right people, you could get the number of the hour.
He picked up on the third ring. “Yeah?”
“I have information about a mutual enemy,” she said, more rapidly than she’d planned. “I’d like to meet to discuss it.”
A pause. “I don’t have any enemies,” Jake Hawthorne said, the breezy unconcern so thick it carried a palpable fuck off undertone. “I’m just that lovable a guy.”
“This enemy owns a place,” Alice said, undeterred, even with the distant sense that she was teetering on the edge of solid ground, soil crumbling under her toes, and the bottom a long way down. “Your friend Tobias lived there once.”
A pause, and then Jake said in a new, dangerously low tone, “Who the fuck is this?”
Alice swallowed. The Hawthornes had never been brought into the family. They were uncontrolled, unpredictable, deadly as any monster out there. “I can’t say here. But I’m a friend, and we have the same goal.”
“Like I trust a single fucking word you say,” Jake snarled. “Where the fuck are you?”
She nearly hung up then, but in the background another voice said, “Jake, what is it?”
Tobias. She recognized his voice in her gut, even if he had grown and changed from the abused boy in the videos. He didn’t sound like a broken child anymore. Alice felt relieved, and her hand shook on her phone.